The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

toward an anthropology of genocide 31
Scheper-Hughes notes, anthropologists have been predisposed to overlook the
forms of political terror and “everyday violence” that often afflict the peoples whom
they study. Even more troubling are the instances in which anthropologists—including
some of the discipline’s founding figures—have passively stood by while
genocide took place, sometimes accepting the dehumanizing metanarratives that
legitimate the destruction of victim groups. The very idea of “salvage ethnography”
reflects anthropology’s ambivalent relation to genocide. On the one hand,
early anthropologists often accepted the destruction of indigenous peoples as the
inevitable consequence of social evolution and “progress.” On the other, many of
these same scholars took an active role in preserving and documenting the cultural
life of these disappearing groups.
Scheper-Hughes illustrates this point with a detailed analysis of Alfred Kroeber’s
relationship with Ishi, whom he called the “last California aborigine,” in the
early twentieth century. At the same time that he befriended and helped Ishi, Kroeber
failed to speak out about the genocide that had devastated Ishi’s Yahis and other
Native American groups. Moreover, Kroeber also allowed his key informant to be
exhibited at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of California on Sundays
and, most strikingly, he permitted Ishi’s brain to be shipped to the Smithsonian
Institution for examination and curation—despite Kroeber’s knowledge of Yahi
beliefs about the dead and Ishi’s dislike of the study of skulls and other body parts.
Rather than simply excusing Kroeber because he lived in a time period during
which a different set of beliefs was ascendant, Scheper-Hughes argues that we must
consider how things might have been done differently. The importance of such
reflection was highlighted in 1999 when Ishi’s brain was found in a Smithsonian
warehouse, and the Berkeley Department of Anthropology deliberated issuing a
statement about the department’s role in what had happened to Ishi.
More broadly, Scheper-Hughes argues that anthropologists should directly confront
a question at the heart of this volume: What makes genocide possible? She
maintains that, to comprehend genocide fully, we must go beyond typical cases and
examine “small wars and invisible genocides” in which the structural dynamics
taken to an extreme in genocide are manifest in everyday life. “Rubbish people”
suffer in both times of war and peace. Thus, street children in Brazil attempt to
survive in a liminal, degraded space that is viewed as dangerous and threatening.
Few people notice or care when these “dirty vermin” disappear or die, frequently
at the hands of police and death squads who describe their murder as “trash removal,”
“street cleaning,” or “urban hygiene.” Similarly, the elderly are turned into
rubbish people in nursing homes where underpaid workers often drop their personal
names, ignore their wishes, associate them with the impure, and treat them
like objects. Such institutionalized forms of everyday violence reconstruct the subjectivity
of the elderly, who, lacking the means to resist, are ultimately forced to
accept their new, dehumanized status. For Scheper-Hughes, it is precisely by examining
this “genocidal continuum” in the practices of everyday life that anthropologists
can contribute to the understanding of genocide.